by Lewis Shiner
“Sure Lindsay supports the arts, but he’s wrecked the city.”
“My accountant says if I don’t turn a profit this year the irs will reclassify me as a hobbyist.”
“Did she really? And went back the next night for more?”
“If the tapes weren’t incriminating, Nixon would have already turned them over.”
“The Mets are going to the series. They got hot bats and momentum.”
At 10:30, as he was ready to call it quits, a disturbance broke out at the elevator. He turned and saw Callie screaming with delight as she hugged a black guy in an ancient raccoon coat, attracting the attention of the entire room. Surrounded by women in jeans, turtlenecks, T-shirts, and cast-off men’s shirts, she radiated color and light. She wore a tight red 1960s minidress, striped knee-high socks, and a brown leather bomber jacket that was too big for her. Her hair was halfway pinned up and already in sensual disarray. Her eyes were lined in black, her lipstick the same red as her dress.
Alex was dizzy and heartsick. She belonged in this world and he was an interloper. Madelyn had been right, he should have played it cool. He had absolutely nothing to say to her under these conditions. While she was distracted, he crossed the room to the stairs, keeping his back to her, and slowly made his way down. He felt like he was fighting the gravitational pull of the sun. After the first flight it stopped feeling impossible and became only brutally painful. Then he heard her voice say, “Alex? Alex, is that you?”
Though he instructed himself to keep walking, his legs stopped moving and his head turned around and up and he locked eyes with her. She’d been smiling until she saw his face, which he imagined to be a cartoon of pathos and misery. They stared at each other for a timeless moment that stretched and finally snapped. Alex resumed his descent, moving quickly now, and emerged into night air chilly enough that he could see his breath. He struck out for his apartment, his feet slapping against the empty sidewalk. At the end of the block he stopped, again fighting his better judgment, and looked back. His disappointment and self-loathing nearly overwhelmed him when he saw that she hadn’t followed.
He called himself names all the way to his tenement, “idiot” and “pendejo” and “loser” among many others, only to get there and realize that the very idea of going up to his room was not bearable. So he walked back to Mercer Street, promising himself he would not go upstairs, merely absorb a little heat from her proximity, and then he would be able to go home again.
When he got to the building and saw Callie leaning against the mailboxes, hazed by cigarette smoke, one sneakered foot artfully positioned against the wall, he experienced a moment of suspended animation, no breath, no pulse, before his heartbeat went into double time. As he approached, she pushed herself off the wall, flicked the cigarette away, and said, “Let’s walk.”
They headed north, not touching, both of them with hands stuck deep into their coat pockets. “This is not going to work out,” Callie said. “I’m the one who makes with the drama and the self-pity and starts the fights. If we both do it, neither one of us is going to get a moment’s peace.”
All that Alex heard was “we” and “us.” He had bounced hard and now was sailing high. Opening his mouth was an unnecessary risk.
A block later, Callie zigzagged west, the opposite direction from Alex’s apartment, and said, “I can’t handle expectations. There’s this part of me that says, ‘What gives you the right?’ It’s been like that since I was a kid. My parents were smart, pulled reverse psychology on me so I would get good grades.” She glanced at him. “In case that gives you ideas, I’m wise to that shit now.”
“Okay,” Alex said happily.
“That’s one of the things I love about the art scene here, the way it fucks with its audience. You want art you can commodify and hang in your living room? We’ll make canvases 20 feet tall or paint it on the side of a subway car.”
“And if I think you should give me your phone number because we had incredibly great sex,” Alex said, “that’s just tough shit for me. I get it. But it was incredibly great sex. Admit it.”
She shrugged. “If you like sex.”
“What?” He stared at her in astonishment until she cracked a smile.
He grabbed her by the neck and pulled her into a kiss. She let out the most enticing sound, a whimper crossed with a sigh, and kissed him back, holding the sides of his face with her hands. He was crazy with desire. “Let’s go to my apartment,” he whispered.
She took a double handful of his hair and pulled on it, turning it into a caress at the point of pain. “Nice try,” she said. She started walking again. “I haven’t eaten all day. Have you got any money?”
“Stone broke.”
“Follow me.” She walked quickly across Houston, around nyu, and into the Village. The streets were suddenly full of tourists and couples on dates. As they turned onto Bleecker Street, she pushed him against a wall and said, “Stay in the shadows.”
Pubs lined the north side of the street, including the Bitter End, a legend in the days of folk, so long ago now. With her bomber jacket hanging open, smiling shyly, she walked up to the first man she came to. Alex only heard fragments of her side of the conversation: “lost my wallet,” “trying to get home,” “anything you can spare.” The man’s expression slipped from pleasure to annoyance as he shook his head, then to wistful as he turned to watch her walk away. The next man gave her some coins, the next two shouldered by her, then an older man with a white beard approached her and gave her a folded bill. She squealed and threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek, and he stumbled away with a dazed smile.
She ran back to Alex and showed him a five-dollar bill. “You take it,” she said. “I hate money.” They bought two slices of pizza each and ate it on the street. Now that he was broke enough to miss meals, Alex was hungry all the time. Callie’s easy success at panhandling had turned her mood around and she became talkative and rambunctiously affectionate. She insisted that they spend every penny that she’d “prostituted” herself for, and they got two cans of Budweiser and a can of Planter’s Cocktail Peanuts, leaving the change on the counter. They walked up Macdougal to the park as Callie wound the key around the peanut can and then threw the key and the lid in the street. Alex told her about seeing Dylan in ’65 and The Chevelles and how so much of the music they played started there in Union Square.
“I remember folkies from high school,” Callie said. She filled her mouth with peanuts and handed Alex the can. “Black turtlenecks,” she said with her mouth full, “glasses, so fucking earnest. None of them had a prayer of getting in my panties.”
“Once they plugged in and got a drummer I bet you changed your mind.”
She laughed and grabbed his arm with both hands. “Maybe. But I don’t want to talk about the past. I hate it. It just gets bigger as the future gets smaller.”
They found a bench to themselves facing the fountain, with the arch in the background, and drank the beer and ate the greasy peanuts. “You talk about this guy Cole a lot,” she said. “Did you guys make it together?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Nothing wrong with it. I make it with chicks sometimes.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not like that.”
“If you say so.”
Kids with guitars still wandered the darkness, ten years too late. Callie laughed at them and said, “They never give up, do they?”
“What’s Callie short for?” Alex asked impulsively. “Calpurnia? Caledonia? Calliope?”
“Calamity,” she said.
Alex laughed. “No, really.”
She looked at him. “Really.”
“Calamity… Janus?” He felt like he’d been mugged. “So that’s not even your real name. It’s another joke.”
“What is reality?” she said.
“Jesus Christ. It’s like trying to grab hold of a wet bar of soap.”
“Soap is clean. I’m dirty.” She leaned in to kiss him, sucked his lower
lip into her mouth, and bit it sharply.
“Ow!” Alex pulled away. “What am I supposed to call you? I’m not going to call you Calamity.”
“You know Bob Dylan’s name isn’t Bob Dylan, and you still call him that.”
“You’re not going to tell me your real name, are you? The one on your birth certificate?”
“You should make up your own name for me.” She paused. “Just don’t expect me to answer to it.”
At three in the morning—after walking up 5th Avenue to Midtown and back, with Callie critiquing the fashions in the shop windows, telling elephant jokes, reciting Sylvia Plath poems, and taking a number of liberties with Alex’s person—they ended up at the top of the stairs outside her loft, kissing passionately. Alex was reduced to Paleolithic lust. “Let me come in with you.”
“No. Too many people.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
He kissed her again, lifting her skirt and slipping his fingers inside her panties. He pushed her gently against the wall and found his way quickly to the heat and wetness between her legs. Her hands were in his hair and her mouth was on his neck. Gradually her breath came faster and faster, and then she was moaning and biting, and then at the end she wrapped both legs around him and let out a stifled cry.
He held her there as she slowly relaxed and her legs fell like dead weight. She gently pushed him away and straightened her dress, smiling dreamily, and kissed him on the nose.
“I want to see you tomorrow,” he said.
She’d turned away to unlock the door. She looked over her shoulder and said, “Two five five five oh nine oh.” While he repeated the numbers to himself, knowing he would get no second chance, she got on the other side of the door and the locks thudded into place.
*
Alex had to be at work Sunday morning at 9. Running on less than four hours of sleep and distracted besides, he ended up exposing some poor bastard’s roll of color film. Moshe, one of his co-workers, said, “Mark it as ‘Defective Canister.’ Fuck it, it happens.” He couldn’t get past it, however, so overwhelmed by sadness and anxiety and guilt that he barely kept himself from quitting on the spot.
At noon he called the number Callie had given him. A man answered and told him Callie was out. He didn’t know where she was or when she’d be back. He dutifully wrote down Alex’s work and home numbers.
Alex called again when he got to his apartment and she was still out. He collapsed and slept until eight, then cooked one of the dozen Swanson Chicken Pot Pies from his freezer, 30 cents each at the corner bodega, and tried to study. His thoughts ricocheted between the golden strip of exposed film and the memory of Callie’s pubic bone against his hand from early that morning.
He refused to make another call to the loft. “Fuck you,” he whispered, so as not to drown out the phone if it should ring downstairs. “Fuck you if you don’t want me.”
He compulsively replayed their conversations from the night before, out of the context of her body heat. “If you like sex… what gives you the right?… this is not going to work out… neither one of us is going to get a moment’s peace.” She’d tried to warn him and he’d refused to listen.
All day Monday he tortured himself with visions of her with other men. He was too stubborn to call again. As he waited for sleep Monday night, he tried telling himself that it was over and that he was better off that way.
Tuesday she was waiting outside his building when he got home from Duane Reed at 4:30 in the afternoon. She was in her oversize bomber jacket, hugging herself against the chill, her skinny legs protruding like popsicle sticks. They stood three feet apart, Alex warily studying her face, Callie looking at her shoes. He’d never seen her so subdued. When she finally looked up, her eyes were damp. “Alex,” she said, “can you ever forgive me?”
He discovered, with some satisfaction, that he wasn’t over being angry. “For what?”
“For running away.”
“Come on upstairs.” He looked back twice on the stairs to make sure she was following, and had to wait for her once he had the apartment door open. “You’re cold,” he said as he locked the deadbolt. “I can make some tomato soup.”
When he turned, she was standing by the bed. She had let the jacket fall halfway to the floor, hanging from her arms as she held them out from her body. She had nothing on under it but an oversize pair of boxer shorts and a white sleeveless undershirt. She looked young and vulnerable.
“I’m scared,” she said. The apartment was cold and as she raised her eyes to him she was trembling.
“Of me?” Alex asked incredulously.
“I’ve been with lots of guys, and I’ve always called the shots because I didn’t care that much. But you…”
He had taken a step toward her without realizing it. She let the jacket fall and reached out to him and he was lost.
She was a different person in bed, passive, melting, enveloping, responding to everything he did, initiating nothing, except, near the end, when she put her hand down between them and touched herself as he moved inside her, bringing herself to a climax that triggered his own.
“I hate this,” Callie said eventually, her arms still tight around him. “I hate you for making me feel like this.”
“Like what?” Alex’s contentment was undercut only by his anxiety about what Callie might do next.
“Don’t make me say it.”
“Since I met you, you’ve consistently shown me that I have no idea what you’re feeling from one moment to the next.”
“For feeling like I need somebody else. I don’t need anybody else.”
Alex felt as euphoric as if a hit of acid was coming on. “Don’t be afraid. This is all new to me too. I’m in love with you, and I’ve never been in love before. Not ever.” The words surprised and frightened him when they came tumbling out of his mouth, but he saw that they were true.
“Taking it as it comes is not my style,” Callie said. “If I’m going to fall, I’m going to kick and scream and gouge fingernail marks in the walls all the way down. You don’t want to be in love with me. I’m crazy. I’ll make you miserable.”
“If this is miserable, I’ll take all of it I can get.”
She sat up, pulled some tissues from the box next to the bed, and scrubbed at the wet spot between her legs. “And I,” she said, “would take some of that soup if it’s still on offer.”
*
Later she told him that she’d run into Paula Cooper at a party. “I mentioned that you were making a film about the Young Lords and how good you were. She was really interested.”
*
Maelo was hanging out in the hall on Friday morning as Alex was leaving for his 9:00 acting class. “Listen,” Alex said, fighting an odd reluctance, “are you still interested in doing a movie? About, you know, the Young Lords?”
Maelo was six feet tall and maybe weighed 150 pounds, much of it in his enormous Afro. His skin was dark brown, his nose wide, his eyes perpetually bloodshot from smoking dope. “Yeah, man, are you up for it?”
“I’m thinking seriously about it.”
“Righteous, man. Whenever you’re ready we’ll go uptown, talk to some of the brothers and sisters.”
What he wanted to say was that he would let Maelo know. What he said instead was, “Is there a good time this weekend?”
*
On Sunday afternoon they took the 6 train up to Spanish Harlem. Alex had an Arriflex bl 16 mm camera, a heavy wooden tripod, a Nagra iv audio tape recorder, sync cable, boom mike, and a half-dozen canisters of black-and-white film stock, each good for a bit over 11 minutes. Altogether it added up to thirty or forty thousand dollars of nyu’s equipment that he and Maelo were about to take into the highest crime neighborhood of the most dangerous city in North America to make a film he wasn’t sure he was ready to make. He couldn’t stop sweating.
Maelo had recruited a couple of members from the Loisaida branch office for “security” and also, apparently, so
he wouldn’t have to carry any of the gear. Miguel was barely over five feet tall and still somewhere in his late teens, with a crew cut and religious-themed tattoos and a homicidal look about him. Felix was not much older, five-ten and soft looking, with round glasses. All three wore their purple berets.
They got off at 110th Street and hiked from Lexington east across Park to Madison, past windowless shells of buildings stained by fire, past red-brick public housing like prison compounds, past people sleeping in doorways in the middle of the afternoon, past kids barely old enough to walk who were wandering alone and barefoot on the sidewalks and pissing into the gutters. Garbage had piled up in the alleys and the air carried the sour stench of it. Traffic was sparse, the cars mostly junkers from the fifties and early sixties. Alex didn’t see any cabs.
They turned north on Madison, crossed 111th, and then Maelo pointed out a white brick building ahead. “That’s the office there.” A guy in jeans, a blue work shirt, and purple beret lounged against the door with an M-1 carbine in port arms position.
“Holy shit,” Alex said. “The cops let him stand there with a rifle right on the street?”
«Mejor hablar español aquí,» Miguel said.
«Sorry,» Alex said in Spanish. Maelo had advised him to play up his Mexican side.
«Cops don’t come here,» Maelo said.
«If they do come,» Miguel said, «they come with respect. And fear.»
Alex himself was terrified. To put off his confrontation with the Central Committee, he suggested they take a few exterior shots from across the street. «Chévere,» Maelo said. «I’ll tell him what we’re doing.» Maelo approached the door guard with his right fist shoulder-high. They ran down some kind of complicated handshake that involved five or six different moves. After an inaudible conversation, Maelo looked at Alex and gave him the okay sign. While Alex mounted the camera on the tripod, Maelo crossed the street to join him, unfazed by oncoming cars. Maybe, Alex thought, the beret really did buy him something in the barrio. Alex loaded a film canister and Maelo made a frame with his hands and pretended to pan up and down the street, a gesture he must have seen on tv.
